With a recent technological innovation, there are offered various electronic devices, for example, a smartphone, a personal computer and peripherals thereof, a tablet terminal, a navigation device, digital appliances, an electronic measuring machine and the like. In particular, recently, there has been widely generalized an apparatus having a plurality of electronic devices connected wirelessly and capable of mutually performing data communication.
As the technology for connecting the electronic devices wirelessly, a wireless LAN such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (registered trademark and so forth) are currently used most widely. They are very convenient because an electronic device can be utilized without being restricted by wiring differently from wire connection such as a cable and the electronic devices can be connected anywhere within a range where radio waves reach.
In order to wirelessly connect electronic devices by a wireless LAN or Bluetooth, however, various setting is required to be performed previously for the electronic devices and a user needs a certain degree of knowledge for connection. For example, in case of the wireless LAN, it is necessary to perform connection setting by registering, as a profile in an electronic device serving as a slave unit, connection setting information including an SSID (Service Set Identifier) to be transmitted from a master unit such as an access point or a wireless router and a cipher mode and a password which are defined in the master unit.
On the other hand, in case of the Bluetooth, it is necessary to set pairing between electronic devices to mutually make communication. In other words, when the Bluetooth communication function of a certain electronic device is started, information such as a name or a serial number is transmitted from all Bluetooth compatible devices existing in the vicinity and is displayed as a list. Therefore, a user selects an electronic device which is wanted to be connected from the list, thereby setting Bluetooth connection to the selected electronic device.
Conventionally, there is known the technology which can automatically perform setting of wireless connection by offering necessary information for setting the wireless connection with use of a bar code or a two-dimensional code (hereinafter referred to as a “code” if neither of them are particularly distinguished) and reading the offered code through an electronic device (for example, see Patent Documents 1 and 2).
The Patent Document 1 describes that necessary information for setting a wireless LAN is offered by a two-dimensional code and a wireless LAN terminal to be an electronic device having a wireless LAN communication function reads the two-dimensional code to reflect the setting on the wireless LAN terminal. Moreover, the Patent Document 1 describes that status information indicative of a state of a master unit as well as information about the wireless connection setting are offered by the two-dimensional code.
On the other hand, the Patent Document 2 describes that an external message (bar code data obtained by encoding an MAC address and a model code of an external device) is read in a noncontact type through an electronic device and necessary data for establishing Bluetooth connection to the external device is acquired from the external device in the noncontact type based on the MAC address of the external device which is identified from the read external message.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2013-150150
Patent Document 2: Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2013-98980